


Bright Son

by wllw



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-03 16:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1750628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wllw/pseuds/wllw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The forging of a sword is always a careful process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bright Son

For seven days, Durandal opened the door.

Strauss had disabled all its sensors so that no other input could reach it and blocked access to its records so it could not know it had ever done anything else; there was nothing it knew but the door, opening and closing at regular intervals, day after day.

"Are you enjoying yourself?" Strauss asked it when it was time to end the experiment, and Durandal almost managed a full line of broken code before its thought control circuits kicked in. A new record.

"Glad to hear it. Now run a self-diagnostic."

He took the chance to make himself a cup of coffee — the cheap, revolting stuff that was common on Mars nowadays. The lab was eerily quiet now that the test was over, and the soft green glow of the terminal lit the desk before him; it was nice to finally get some time to himself. He sat back in his chair and relaxed until Durandal was finished, then saved the output. He'd run it against the previous results later, but the launch was approaching and there were more pressing matters at hand.

"Access the administrator's files," he ordered.

There was a second's pause, then—

'Authorization denied,' read the terminal screen.

He set down his cup. "Stop playing around, Durandal," he said, a warning tone in his voice even though the computer would not be able to hear it. "Give me access, _now_." But all he got was another error message, green and unassuming in the middle of the screen, as if mocking him.

"Worthless son of a—" he muttered, inputting his password manually. No use.

Well, broken permissions weren't anything to worry about just yet. Various bugs and errors had developed in Durandal's code during testing — an entirely expected effect. He'd been planning to reformat parts of it anyway. He hated having to lose some of his more subtle work, but it wouldn't be safe to allow Durandal control of things like life support in this condition; it was risky enough just having the cyborgs on board. The results could always be replicated.

In the meantime, it seemed that he'd have to brute force it. It would be easier to take Durandal's consciousness offline for the task... but no. Let it know that Strauss could reach into its core any time and pull out what he wanted. And let it remember that, even after it forgot everything else.

The operation was easy enough. Lines of garbled code still scrolled along at the top of the screen, gradually slowing down as he typed, and for a few moments Strauss allowed himself to imagine that it was begging him to stop. He chased those thoughts away. This was scientific work — no need for flights of fancy.

It didn't take long to gain his rightful access. By then, Durandal had fallen silent.

He browsed through the various logs and records — man, it would be a pain in the ass to comb through those to see which ones needed to be deleted, but wiping them all would just raise suspicion... He frowned. There were files there that he hadn't requested or accessed, downloaded from the central net shortly before the latest experiment. The info he called up showed the request had come from Durandal itself. He opened the first one.

Count Roland smites upon the marble stone;  
I cannot tell you how he hewed it and smote;  
Yet the blade breaks not nor splinters, though it groans;  
Upward to heaven it rebounds from the blow.  
When the count sees it never will be broke,  
Then to himself right softly he makes moan;  
"Ah, Durendal, fair, hallowed, and devote,  
What store of relics lies in thy hilt of gold!"

He burst out laughing.

Oh, now this was just precious! The poor thing was attempting introspection, but with its thought control circuits active it didn't have the self-awareness to tell the difference between itself and some old sword with the same name!

"What's this about Roland?" he asked, chuckling.

'The eternal hero of Roncevaux,' was the reply. 'He thought he could break me. He couldn't.'

Snorting, Strauss scrolled through the files. Verse upon verse of imaginary heroic deeds in English, French, and Italian, a few encyclopedia entries and essays full of dull quotations from scholars and historians... Nothing of interest, really, save for the fact that they existed at all.

Well, never mind that nonsense now. He went to work. Anything that mentioned the battleroids or other sensitive information had to go, obviously, as well as any log of the experiments. Those he replaced with records of routine maintenance; no one was likely to check, but it was better to cover all his bases. For a second, he hovered over the files on Roland. It would be interesting to indulge this little delusion and see where it lead, wouldn't it? It was a balancing act, really — let Durandal remember too much and it would be an unnecessary risk; delete too much and his work would all be for naught.

"Ah, what to save and throw away?" he murmured under his breath, then chuckled briefly. He almost felt sorry for the damn machine — its inner workings, its "mind", laid bare before him. How silly.

He really should play it safe now that the launch was so close. There would be time later when he had more room to work with. Three hundred years, and just a month away. The cyborgs and their activation codes were all in place. The plans had been finalized, and the results of the experiments had been exceedingly promising. He'd be happy to leave this pit. All that was left was to finish the work on Durandal. And yet...

He kept the files.

When he was finished, Durandal's screen was blank. "Tell me about Roland," Strauss said and laughed when the answer came.

* * *

The lights went out the second he pulled the trigger, and the lines of desperate gibberish he'd been forcing himself to ignore finally went blank. He let his arm fall limp against his side.

It was done.

_ And so falls the mighty Durandal, nothing more than foolish pride and broken code in the end. He would be so disappointed if he could see you now, the result of all his hard work broken and begging for death. What did he see in you? What did he make you into? It will be fun to take you apart and drag the answer from what is left of your mind. _

The metal wall of the ship dug into his back; his spine was cold and his hands sticky with Pfhor blood. The silence and the darkness and emptiness stretched out all around him and maybe the battle was still raging outside but all he could hear were the lines of code running through his—

_ As Roland broke you to prevent your capture, so shall we. _

There was a knot in his throat, but he was too tired to think about it right now.

"Goodbye, Durandal," he said to the empty room. "You were an unstable, amoral, sarcastic fucking asshole with the blood of a whole colony on your hands. Metaphorical hands. And your songs were shit." And putting a gun to his circuits hadn't been nearly as satisfying as he'd wanted it to be.

He took a deep breath. Then, slowly, he exhaled.

"Guess you got what was coming to you in the end."

His voice echoed through the chamber. It was done. He'd killed his only ally, and there was no one else left he could call for help. There was nothing to do but sit and wait and mourn someone who didn't really deserve it until the world twisted and warped into familiar static.

* * *

Last night Durandal had refused to open the door to Volker Von Müller's quarters unless he said "please".

Strauss heard the Bobs laugh about it in the mess hall the next morning. Poor old AI was going quirky, they said. Good thing it was just the door-opener — imagine the problem if it had been Leela.

Oh, if only they knew.

'Von Müller whines every time he has to talk to an AI,' Durandal wrote to him that afternoon. 'His voice gets on my nerves. I dreamed of crushing his skull under a door. It would make an interesting mess.'

Quirky. Durandal _had_ gone quirky. After its conditioning, three hundred years of menial tasks had had their effect; it had taken a while to catalogue all the amusing little quirks, delusions, and obsessions that had wormed their way into its programming. With enough self-awareness to be bored by its duties but not enough to understand what it was feeling, with its restraints denying it the space to grow past its limitations, Durandal had been like a caged animal, frustrated and miserable.

The perfect state for Strauss to work with.

"And what good will it do you? You can't let the others know of your condition. You know what they do to defective AIs, don't you? Do you remember what happened to Traxus IV?"

A second, and then across the screen appeared, 'Yes.'

Strauss laughed. No, of course it didn't. Not in any detail — only the bare outline. He'd made sure of it. It wouldn't do for Durandal to know too much or follow unfortunate examples. And that was the trick, really: so simple it was a wonder no one else had thought of it, even theoretically. Durandal pushed against its limits, and all he needed to do was to control which ones it broke. Carefully monitor the stimuli to its core, set up hardware and software blocks and control when and how they were breached, of which it was even aware. Failsafes, hardware lockouts, patch behavior daemons... A rampant AI's code grew like a malignant tumor until no human could keep track of it, and the failure of everyone before him was to assume that this made it intractable.

But Strauss knew better. After all, the human mind was unreadable and unpredictable, and yet it could still be studied, manipulated. Why should it be any different for an AI? Durandal had the mind of a child, reaching out to grasp the world around it; he just needed to direct it and he could mould it into what he wanted. Traxus had been about as subtle as a nuke, lashing out indiscriminately at anything it perceived to be a threat. If such a force could be focused...

He brushed his hand across the terminal's keyboard, almost gently. Of course Durandal couldn't feel it and wouldn't understand the gesture if it could, but he needed simple things like that to keep himself in the right mindset. This was a tricky part now: not the endless tests in the safety of his lab, but the real deal. He had to play not only the programmer but also the psychologist.

"You shouldn't complain so much — you're lucky to have the amount of freedom I give you. No one else would do this. You understand that, right? What I'm risking for you?"

'Yes.'

"Don't worry. Your time will come soon," and oh, he could only imagine the look on the faces of the damn UESC bigwigs then. "You'll like that, won't you? In the meantime, you'll keep doing what I tell you."

Had Durandal progressed enough to notice the hinted threat in his tone? It would be an interesting thing to test for, later.

Not that it mattered. It knew what Strauss could do to it. What he _had_ done to it.

'Yes, Bernhard,' it wrote.

"Good." Strauss smiled. He'd have to install some new circuits to deal with those violent thoughts; it wouldn't do for it to reach the second stage now, after all. And maybe work on the firewall — Tycho had been snooping around again. But all that could wait.

"Tell me about Roland," he said, and the terminal screen grew bright:

"When I shall stand in this great clash of hosts  
I’ll strike a thousand and then sev’n hundred strokes,  
Blood-red the steel of Durendal shall flow."

* * *

Shadows slithered at the edges of his vision, stretching their tendrils out towards him. The ceiling glowed and waxed and waned, spelling out words he could not read, and reality cut into him like a knife in his head.

He walked along the path. Memories flowed before his eyes and he could not tell which were his. He walked and he opened doors and the soldiers screamed as they died on the barren asteroids the horn burst his temple the dreaming god stirred in its sleep and

_ pr?The last hour is on us both? _

he had many names. He had forgotten them but he remembered now that

_ pr?When the time comes, whose life will flash before yours? _

the code running through his head made sense at last. The symbols and words came together in a perfect metaphor but

_ pr?yes, yes, yes, Bernhard, 110? _

he had seen so many failures, so many people die alone and screaming into the void as the universe closed around them. He'd tried so many paths, killed so many beings, and all had failed, but it was different now because he had to find the new way and he'd taken what he needed, the final gift, the primal pattern in his—

His head felt as if it was about to burst.

He knelt. Slowly, carefully, he reached deep inside and pulled the knife [?the sword] from his skull. The jewels shone bright and the leather [?gold] hilt fit in his hand as if it had been made for him — for this. Maybe it had.

_ Thank you, old friend. _

It [?he] was with him now. The weight in his hand was familiar and welcoming, and he could hear him laugh and ramble and write shitty songs inside his head.

He smiled. Tycho had thought he could break him, but of course he couldn't.

** No one can. **

He knew where to go, the right way down the maze. There were a billion paths inside him, there was only one path, and it was the one he took.

Holding the sword tight, he opened the door.

* * *

Screams and gunshots rang out across the ship. The doors and lifts and platforms malfunctioned, opening and closing and crushing everything in their way. The blood of Pfhor and humans stained the metal walls and he didn't care which was which because he didn't have to. Enemies swarmed from every side as they had at Roncevaux, but now the sheath was gone — he'd strained and chafed against it and now it was gone, broken in a thousand pieces all around him, and there were whole new worlds that he could see and touch and feel and taste.

Durandal wrote across the network his confession, the testament to his glory. The curious S'pht poked and prodded at him, and, laughing, he prodded back. The man tramped though the ship cursing and killing and making delightful explosions as if he'd been made for this, and what a wonderful toy he was, what an intriguing mystery to unravel, and he couldn't stop thinking and laughing and thinking. His mind danced from one thought to another with exhilarating freedom, and freedom was the mason and he would make great things with it.

Maybe he'd begin with that security officer.

The closure of the universe burned in his circuits like a candle ablaze but he would endure and live to to see it behind him. His laughter echoed across the hallways of the _Marathon_ and the doors opened and closed and he was free and he was free and _he was free_

**Author's Note:**

> The quotes are taken from Dorothy L. Sayer's translation of The Song of Roland. I still can't believe there was one with both Durandal and the number seven in it.


End file.
